Conserving the emperors and dukes of the British butterfly world is no stroll in the park for the National Trust’s butterfly expert, Matthew Oates.
'When I’m out butterflying, I get lost in what I call "en-wonderment". Butterflies are fascinating in the extreme. They take you to the most captivating of all places – woodlands, mountains, grasslands and the coast – and the more you learn about them, the more you realise there is to be learnt and the less you know. They are highly addictive. If I don’t get some quality butterflying three days a week in summer, I am impossible to live or work with – it hurts.
'The National Trust has a huge responsibility towards the conservation of butterflies. We protect many butterfly-rich habitats, and we are working on some highly necessary projects.
'At the Holnicote Estate in east Exmoor we are restoring the declining heath fritillary butterfly, which has really plummeted. I work with a brilliant team of wardens, and we’ve managed to turn this around spectacularly well.
'There’s always good banter even when it’s sweltering and we’re having a planning meeting in dense bracken on a hillside. Occasionally, we end up in a Trust tea garden – that’s my kind of day.
'I am a specialist in grazing ecology – what cows, sheep, goats and other creatures do to vegetation. This is fundamental to nature conservation because without their actions we get woodland and lose the heaths and grasslands that many butterflies depend on.
'The two richest butterfly habitats in this country are chalk and limestone downland, like Box Hill in Surrey, and mixed deciduous lowland forest, such as Bookham Common, again in Surrey.
'Rodborough Common in the Cotswolds is one of my favourite places for butterflying. It’s very much Laurie Lee country and a top national butterfly site. It’s a good place for seeing His Grace, the Duke of Burgundy, which is a small, orange and black fritillary. He’s not well behaved: the male is belligerent and acts like a skinhead. But there are only five colonies left in Britain, two on our sites, and so we’ve really got to care for them.
'I am a servant to the monarch of all butterflies... His Imperial Majesty, the purple emperor. It is without a doubt my favourite butterfly and is extremely elusive and very hard to study. For me that makes it utterly captivating, and I’m on a lifetime pilgrimage to unravel the mystery about this species. But, if I crack it, the butterfly will lose its magic.
'At the age of 10 I got sent to school in butterfly-rich West Sussex. There was an elderly housemaster – a gentle giant – who had been teaching maths without humour for several centuries to the uninterested. But, on Tuesday afternoons in the summer, he ran a butterfly and moth collecting group. He never knew my name but nonetheless he fired me up – he was the catalyst, and I owe him everything.
'I have a favourite butterfly net called Isis. I started catching butterflies, however, in a pink shrimping net – in the summer of 1964. My identification skills do not require a net now, but some ‘mark and recapture’ studies do, when you catch a butterfly and put a dot in a certain place, say the underside of its wings, using a special felt-tip pen. If you can trap it a certain amount of time later, you can begin to determine things such as the size of its range.
'I am very interested in environmental philosophy. I helped form a new group called VINE (Values In Nature and the Environment). We are probably going to get accused of being tree huggers – I rather hope so. I’m also a member of the charity Butterfly Conservation, and have developed a close working partnership between them and the National Trust.
'"Blessed are the cracked for they let in the light". This is a fundamental maxim to my life; I believe in it and also in the need for organisations to push at the limits of the system. The National Trust does – it is part of British eccentricity and is something we should celebrate.'
Taken from the autumn 2006 edition of the National Trust magazine.
|
